I have been a part of many conversations lately with clients who have heard about a shiny new product that sounds very cool or cutting edge and they would like to jump on the bandwagon. The questions is, is there any actual business value for them to use it? Solutions are great if you need them, but if you buy something you don’t need, you are just increasing your costs. Furthermore, your customers aren’t going to use this new tool that you offer them if there is no need for it.

Too many conversations start with the solution rather than the problem.

Start by making a list of common problems that you see in your contact center. Once you have that list, take a good look at each problem and ask yourself the following: Can I measure the cost of this problem in dollars and cents to the business?

Problems need to be quantifiable or measurable. Why? Because solutions also need to be quantifiable or measurable. If you can’t measure the success of a solution, then it’s not a solution. In addition, if you need funds to implement the solution, then you need to be able to measure its success.

So how do you determine the cost of the problem? Contact Center tools are full of analytics that enable us to measure performance at both the macro and micro level. We can measure wait times, abandonment, concurrency, agent states, handle times, etc. Moving the needle on any one of these metrics can have an immediate measurable cost or savings to your business.

Now that we know the cost associated with a problem, we can think about the possible solutions. Maybe that shiny new product that we were talking about earlier actually does solve for one of these problems. Maybe it doesn’t. But now we can make an informed decision about what we actually need as opposed to what we just think we need.

Now we look at the time and level of effort required to implement the different solutions. We can measure that against the cost of each as well as the impact of each of these solutions on the business. We also measure the opportunity cost of choosing one of these solutions over another.

Are there any low hanging fruit that we can grab here? Problems and solutions that will be relatively quick to fix or implement? I like to grab quick wins wherever I can. Are you unsure of what your problems are in the contact center? Reach out to us so we can help you diagnose them. Let’s work together to increase efficiency in your contact center. Driving efficiencies can decrease costs, increase revenue, and improve the experiences of your customers.

Max Greene

Customer Value Manager

You Are Invited

Indy Event: Cloud Vs. Premise – How to Know Which is Right for YouLocation: Topgolf Date: December 4, 2018 Time: 9:00 AM EST